Meet the Woman Making Over the High Line

Meet Cecilia Alemani, director of the public art program for the High Line, who does not think public art should be, well, self-serious

For an art curator, Cecilia Alemani spends a lot of time worrying about the weather. She's become an amateur meteorologist, or at least a chance-of-rain anticipator, since she was named director of the art program for the High Line, an abandoned railroad turned elevated park that threads through the postindustrial luxe of Manhattan's Chelsea—home to the greatest concentration of art galleries on the planet.

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Courtesy of Friends of the High Line, the New Museum

Benoit Pailley

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To mark the close of a wet summer, she'd organized a September 18 performance for High Line patrons that could have easily been washed out: Pablo Bronstein's "Intermezzo: Two girls wear fashion garments on a palm tree" was scheduled to take place post-cocktails, predinner, on a segment located just north of Diane von Furstenberg's atelier on 14th Street. The clouds were threatening. What if it rained on Cindy Sherman?

A curly-haired, 36-year-old Italian often clad in Ferrari yellow or red, Alemani is the ever-smiling half of one of the most influential, least self-serious art-world power couples. Her husband—restlessly clever, 39-year-old fellow Italian Massimiliano Gioni—is the director of exhibitions at New York's New Museum and in 2013 oversaw the Venice Biennale, an art show/convention of global tastemakers. "So many people in the art world are bitter and jaded," says artist Andra Ursuta, who has worked with both Alemani and Gioni. "But they are full of life force. It doesn't feel tired or opportunistic. The shows that they put on are focused on placing art as an essential component of life."

When I met the pair this summer for soba noodles by their East Village apartment—yes, it rained that night, and I showed up soaked through—they'd just returned from a whale-watching trip. "You get very close," Gioni says. As usual, he's wearing a white button-down and an expression that suggests he's recalling a private joke.

"And you get really wet," says Alemani.

"I like animals a lot," Gioni says. They egg each other on, a near-giddy conspiracy of two. While Alemani talks about Frank Benson's Human Statue (Jessie) (2011) on the High Line, she pulls out her iPhone to show how passersby dressed it up in a boa and a rainbow flag and holding a banana during Gay Pride week. She giggles.

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Says High Line cofounder Robert Hammond, "I was expecting this super sophisticated, intimidating Italian woman. But she was so accessible and friendly. She wants to make this program work not just for the art world, but for [all] people."

Gioni is similar. His Biennale theme was "The Encyclopedic Palace," and it resembled an enormous flea market, with high art and the private obsessions of oddball outsiders (such as a selection of paños, handkerchief drawings by Mexican-American prisoners) jumbled together. The vibe: Isn't the human animal interesting?

The two grew up in Milan and met thanks to artist Maurizio Cattelan, who's known for his darkly funny sculptures: an elephant draped in what looks like a KKK sheet; Hitler on his knees, praying; the pope being hit by a meteorite. Gioni met Cattelan when he interviewed him for the Italian magazine Flash Art, and they started collaborating. Gioni became his secret double: Because Cattelan disliked public speaking, Gioni would give lectures posing as the artist. (This might also count as conceptual art; today they run a tiny art space in New York called Family Business.)

Courtesy of Friends of the High Line, Linda Nylind

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While working in a gallery in Milan, Alemani attended the after-party for a show Gioni had curated. "It was wild," she says, and Cattelan "tried to take all these weird pictures of my knee," which isn't quite as odd as it sounds, because she'd fallen playing basketball and was wearing an elaborate knee brace.

That was that, but soon after, Alemani moved to New York to get a master's in curatorial studies from Bard College and the following summer needed an internship. She e-mailed Gioni: "Do you remember me? I was the woman wearing that weird thing on my knee at your party." She got hired to work in Spain on Manifesta 5, a roving European art biennial he was curating, and their relationship turned personal. "We don't talk about that much," she says, laughing.

For the first two years, she was in New York while he worked mostly in Berlin. They didn't see each other often, but the distance kept them together by giving them space to develop apart.

In late 2006, the New Museum hired Gioni, and they moved in together. (They married in 2010 at City Hall, "because I didn't have insurance," Alemani says.) "I do really admire their relationship," says Ursuta, adding that whenever she and her husband bicker, she tells him, "I'm sure Cecilia and Massimiliano are not fighting as much as we are."

Their life together seems all travel, parties, and dinners—but mostly it's looking at art. And they look all over the world (they visited Beirut in September, despite the civil war in nearby Syria). "It's nerdy to confess, but we make lists of things we have to talk about," Gioni says. "And when we go away for a week…."

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"We drive and spend hours in the car," says Alemani.

"We say, 'These are the six, seven things….' "

There is one ironclad rule in their relationship: no art in the house. "If we have anything, we keep it in a cardboard box," Alemani says. "It's nice to go home and look at white walls."

Gioni quotes a curator he knows: "A curator who has artwork on the walls is like a surgeon who can't sew and has blood all over the place." Besides, their true home is in Milan, Alemani says. "That's where we have the real furniture, not the IKEA furniture, and the walls are real brick." Nonetheless, New York is the place that accepted them and allowed them to flourish when, Gioni says, it seemed like "every job in Italy was taken." And it's where they say they're likely to remain.

That September night on the High Line, the weather held up, even if the performance didn't quite. Two girls did indeed dance, in the basket of a cherry picker, and while they weren't on a palm tree, they were in front of one, shipped in from Florida. The caramelized sea scallops and cauliflower gnocchi were tasty, the Hudson River view spectacular. Sherman, Chuck Close, and Elizabeth Olsen politely sipped cocktails. Not everything can be perfect.

Afterward, as Alemani and Gioni walked down 14th Street chatting about finding an adoptive home for that night's featured plant, I think back about something Gioni told me over soba: that, as he puts it, it's a "misperception that the art world is for the rich." Coming from a "working-class family," Gioni was remade by art, he says, and he and Alemani want to show others the same possibility. "[Art] is a playground where people can transform themselves," he says, "where they can be somebody else." And then the two go off into the night, laughing, and Gioni playfully grabs his wife's butt.

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